[UNRESPONSIVE POOL OPERATOR] 50BTC.com

[50BTC.com]

Status Update

After the attacks that we’ve experienced from August 2013 till the October we’ve lost user balances data and huge part of the funds. We still can not figure out the full list of vulnerabilities that have been used to perform the attack. One of the assumptions is physical unauthorised access to our servers which could take a place only if someone got an access to the hardware in datacenter.

Also we can’t rule out the possibility that someone found or create an exposure or backdoor in our billing software.

Currently we have few topics to deal with:

First thing that we’ve been able to figure out is that few fast miners have been cheating us using vulnerability in difficulty checking algorithm. This vulnerability is probably applicable to the other fair pools, so we will publish description in next few hours to help others avoid our fate. This difficulty fraud have led to the loss of the significant part of the funds.

Second thing is incessant DDOS attacks that started in early August and magically stopped in few days after billing was hacked (that seems to be the last stage of the attack).

Third thing is that we have weird jumping luck during August-September period which jumped from 40% to 120% daily and sharply increased hash rate of the few new users with abnormal large amount of stale shares. 

Obviously this couldn’t be a regular coincidence and obviously this can’t be applied by one certain user. In general all of this only make sense if one or few competing pools decided to eliminate 50BTC for whatever reason. We are exploring all available data to figure out if some users was not real users but the proxied shares from the evilpool.

When miner formally connects to the evilpool it actually goes to the 50BTC through a proxy to get a job, and after that evilpool proxies all shares except of winning ones back to 50BTC. This could cause total bad luck that we’ve faced in a last few weeks.

But this is for sure not only things we will find in the next few days, before we will get the confidence that funds in pools wallets are safe. Only after that we will put additional funds and will enable payouts.

Still we are looking forward into the future with a hope and working damn hard rewriting our billing subsystem and moving our hardware to the another datacenter.

For all our users who believe in us and for all those bullshit fuckers who think that 50BTC is dead and already celebrating their victory, we have one main message:

50BTC is alive and will get back fast and stable as a hell in next few weeks.

Stay tuned

[Mr. Sway]

Status Update

After the attacks that we’ve experienced from August 2013 till the October we’ve lost user balances data and huge part of the funds. We still can not figure out the full list of vulnerabilities that have been used to perform the attack. One of the assumptions is physical unauthorised access to our servers which could take a place only if someone got an access to the hardware in datacenter.

Also we can’t rule out the possibility that someone found or create an exposure or backdoor in our billing software.

Currently we have few topics to deal with:

First thing that we’ve been able to figure out is that few fast miners have been cheating us using vulnerability in difficulty checking algorithm. This vulnerability is probably applicable to the other fair pools, so we will publish description in next few hours to help others avoid our fate. This difficulty fraud have led to the loss of the significant part of the funds.

Second thing is incessant DDOS attacks that started in early August and magically stopped in few days after billing was hacked (that seems to be the last stage of the attack).

Third thing is that we have weird jumping luck during August-September period which jumped from 40% to 120% daily and sharply increased hash rate of the few new users with abnormal large amount of stale shares. 

Obviously this couldn’t be a regular coincidence and obviously this can’t be applied by one certain user. In general all of this only make sense if one or few competing pools decided to eliminate 50BTC for whatever reason. We are exploring all available data to figure out if some users was not real users but the proxied shares from the evilpool.

When miner formally connects to the evilpool it actually goes to the 50BTC through a proxy to get a job, and after that evilpool proxies all shares except of winning ones back to 50BTC. This could cause total bad luck that we’ve faced in a last few weeks.

But this is for sure not only things we will find in the next few days, before we will get the confidence that funds in pools wallets are safe. Only after that we will put additional funds and will enable payouts.

Still we are looking forward into the future with a hope and working damn hard rewriting our billing subsystem and moving our hardware to the another datacenter.

For all our users who believe in us and for all those bullshit fuckers who think that 50BTC is dead and already celebrating their victory, we have one main message:

50BTC is alive and will get back fast and stable as a hell in next few weeks.

Stay tuned

I know a good bit about scanning for vulns  I am willing to do it for you guys.

[PilotCurly99]

Thank you for the update.  I can't speak for everyone, but the more you communicate, the more likely you are to come back from this.

I do wish you the best.  That was a great explanation.

[Sitarow]

Status Update

For all our users who believe in us and for all those bullshit fuckers who think that 50BTC is dead and already celebrating their victory, we have one main message:

50BTC is alive and will get back fast and stable as a hell in next few weeks.

Stay tuned

That is good news.

[miner49er]

Here, here! best of luck, please keep us informed.

[aynstein]

Well my account has a few oddities that fit the above profile and some other strangeness beyond the extra 200+ btc in my balance. I would happily disclose in private, you may find it helpful. I am sure you guys are swamped but when you get around to it I am happy to go over them with you.
 

[AussieHash]

Can you share any details of the evilpool?

I notice that organifcorti has reported large hashrate up spikes in certain pools, and whether by coincidence or not, another large pool has seen anecdotal repors of hashrate drops by 200TH or so.

That may not necessarily mean the attacker is a pool, it could be a private group/state group with 200TH of miners (plus the ability to DDOS)

[Nemo1024]

Thanks for the update, guys. Keep it up. You were the first pool that I ever used and I sure hope you will still be around.
I too have 200+ BTC reported on my account balance, though I for sure know that I had less that 0.005 after the last payout that I performed.

[ehoffman]

Are you able to login guys?  I get "A record with the supplied identity could not be found." (And I double-checked the login credentials...)

[fungal]

Well, here is an idea... and what I am doing...

To help out and be a good user of the service (which I hope is recognised at a later date by 50btc.com) I am sending the occasional hashing to their pool even if it is just some Mhps, if we all did it, then the hash rate would improve for them and as I said, hopefully they will appreciate it at a later time when they are able to, for example, maybe for people who help them to have a special rate like a 0% fee as a thank you? Just a thought as it would be sad to see the pool die further as it is currently 6,674GHps, a far cry from the hay day.

Another example... If you got 10 asic BE USBs, maybe split one off to hash for 50btc.com ? it is only 10% of your hash rate so will not make a big difference to most but if 20 people did that it would be more that their current hash rate at this point in time.

Again this is just a thought as I am a sentimental guy and hate to see things like this happen whilst everyone just thinks about their money.

regards
B

[fungal]

Are you able to login guys?  I get "A record with the supplied identity could not be found." (And I double-checked the login credentials...)

Yep, logged in ok for me...

[Tesla71]

Well, here is an idea... and what I am doing...

To help out and be a good user of the service (which I hope is recognised at a later date by 50btc.com) I am sending the occasional hashing to their pool even if it is just some Mhps, if we all did it, then the hash rate would improve for them and as I said, hopefully they will appreciate it at a later time when they are able to, for example, maybe for people who help them to have a special rate like a 0% fee as a thank you? Just a thought as it would be sad to see the pool die further as it is currently 6,674GHps, a far cry from the hay day.

Another example... If you got 10 asic BE USBs, maybe split one off to hash for 50btc.com ? it is only 10% of your hash rate so will not make a big difference to most but if 20 people did that it would be more that their current hash rate at this point in time.

Again this is just a thought as I am a sentimental guy and hate to see things like this happen whilst everyone just thinks about their money.

regards
B

+1 as I believe they will be back

[fungal]

Well, here is an idea... and what I am doing...

To help out and be a good user of the service (which I hope is recognised at a later date by 50btc.com) I am sending the occasional hashing to their pool even if it is just some Mhps, if we all did it, then the hash rate would improve for them and as I said, hopefully they will appreciate it at a later time when they are able to, for example, maybe for people who help them to have a special rate like a 0% fee as a thank you? Just a thought as it would be sad to see the pool die further as it is currently 6,674GHps, a far cry from the hay day.

Another example... If you got 10 asic BE USBs, maybe split one off to hash for 50btc.com ? it is only 10% of your hash rate so will not make a big difference to most but if 20 people did that it would be more that their current hash rate at this point in time.

Again this is just a thought as I am a sentimental guy and hate to see things like this happen whilst everyone just thinks about their money.

regards
B

+1 as I believe they will be back

+1 as I like your plus 1 to me..  oh yeh I also believe they will be back, the domain is way too popular.

[Zelek Uther]

Well, here is an idea... and what I am doing...

To help out and be a good user of the service (which I hope is recognised at a later date by 50btc.com) I am sending the occasional hashing to their pool even if it is just some Mhps, if we all did it, then the hash rate would improve for them and as I said, hopefully they will appreciate it at a later time when they are able to, for example, maybe for people who help them to have a special rate like a 0% fee as a thank you? Just a thought as it would be sad to see the pool die further as it is currently 6,674GHps, a far cry from the hay day.

Another example... If you got 10 asic BE USBs, maybe split one off to hash for 50btc.com ? it is only 10% of your hash rate so will not make a big difference to most but if 20 people did that it would be more that their current hash rate at this point in time.

Again this is just a thought as I am a sentimental guy and hate to see things like this happen whilst everyone just thinks about their money.

regards
B

I've got 9 ASICMINER Block Erupter USBs, and I've kept one mining on 50BTC the whole time.  Bit worried though, because for a few hours now my hash rate on 50BTC is reporting as 0, but when I look at cgminer I'm definitely submitting shares.  Looks like everyone's hash rate right now on 50BTC is reported as 0!

[fungal]

Well, here is an idea... and what I am doing...

To help out and be a good user of the service (which I hope is recognised at a later date by 50btc.com) I am sending the occasional hashing to their pool even if it is just some Mhps, if we all did it, then the hash rate would improve for them and as I said, hopefully they will appreciate it at a later time when they are able to, for example, maybe for people who help them to have a special rate like a 0% fee as a thank you? Just a thought as it would be sad to see the pool die further as it is currently 6,674GHps, a far cry from the hay day.

Another example... If you got 10 asic BE USBs, maybe split one off to hash for 50btc.com ? it is only 10% of your hash rate so will not make a big difference to most but if 20 people did that it would be more that their current hash rate at this point in time.

Again this is just a thought as I am a sentimental guy and hate to see things like this happen whilst everyone just thinks about their money.

regards
B

I've got 9 ASICMINER Block Erupter USBs, and I've kept one mining on 50BTC the whole time.  Bit worried though, because for a few hours now my hash rate on 50BTC is reporting as 0, but when I look at cgminer I'm definitely submitting shares.  Looks like everyone's hash rate right now on 50BTC is reported as 0!

I have seen this before, long before there, and on other sites, I think it maybe just a refresh issue. You will probably see it will state you have no miners connected also.

[fungal]

Hmm... hash rate keeps dropping... 5,946Gh right now...

[silverston]

No any normal person would not be there mine, until they pay the debts of

[fungal]

No any normal person would not be there mine, until they pay the debts of

So you would say, liquidate and not let them trade out (in business terms)? More an American type of logic... where as if they do have financial issues and they can trade out and everyone gets their btc... is that not a better option than them shutting down and all the users losing out, because some people just don't care?

Please do not be offended, I am not suggesting you are American, just it is that type of mentality that I see from them, an observation if you will...

[PaulC2K]

No any normal person would not be there mine, until they pay the debts of

So you would say, liquidate and not let them trade out (in business terms)? More an American type of logic... where as if they do have financial issues and they can trade out and everyone gets their btc... is that not a better option than them shutting down and all the users losing out, because some people just don't care?

Please do not be offended, I am not suggesting you are American, just it is that type of mentality that I see from them, an observation if you will...

I cant speak for the other guy, but i'd have no issue mining there, even with a outstanding debt owed, if i knew what i was mining at the time was at least being credited and paid.
Im part of a collective of members in ProgressiveBTCMining.com and they were using 50BTC with a 0.5btc automated payment set up, and it accumulated a little over 2.5btc (2.75 ish) before it became obvious it was a bigger issue than they'd been claiming and just like everyone else those funds are in a frozen payout queue.

Now, i'd be willing to agree to return to 50BTC, trusting them to pay their obligations to their users when they can, while returning to the PPS system and paying out as requested. It wouldnt be my decision, but i'd vote that way.
Obviously, the issues they have make this a non-starter for them, if they've got some sort of vulnerability with how they've set their PPS system up then they shouldnt return it, and because they cant offer PPS, i feel no rational obligation to mine their over any other location and i dont think thats unreasonable.
I know for a fact we'd return if things went back to normal (a fool-proof, un-exploitable version of normal) with PPS, although *if* they refused to pay out their existing obligations (legit ones) that might be a different matter, and i suspect most people would have no trouble returning.

Would i put my own hashrate in their direction with uncertainties hanging over them, sadly not. But when those disappear, i'd have no issue.
PBM has a loyalty to its members first, and 50BTC is already holding some of our funds, i wouldnt be impressed if they started moving their hashrate back, prioritising loyalty to 50BTC before its members.

Sadly this is all business, 50BTC is a business, it profits handsomely from offering a popular service, and what it earns it deserves. But when its not offering that full service, people will find an alternative service. Its not unreasonable behaviour. I honestly wish them a speedy recovery, but i'd be using their 'rivals' (aka 'evilpool' ) while their service isnt being offered to an acceptable standard. Its honourable if people want to stick by them, but i doubt many are keen to continue stockpiling funds they cannot access and action on.

[forzendiablo]

they shoul d at least pay a bit of whats owed